[Samba] Announcing a community effort to provide "LTS" for Samba 4.17: Samba LTS Community

[Andrew Bartlett]

At https://gitlab.com/samba-team/lts-community/samba some Samba
community members are collaborating to provide backports for Samba 4.17
for longer than the official Samba release cycle.

See https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_LTS_Community for our wiki
page. 

This is not an effort of the Samba Team itself, but the Samba Team is
grateful to provide a neutral host and the CI so that quality can be
maintained by the community members doing the work. 

In terms of actual engineering the project itself will stay consistent
with the Samba Team's rule of two-team members to approve each change,
and is planning to manage that via GitLab merge requests for public
patches, and the existing Bugzilla process if any work is done under
embargo.  Mailing list collaboration will be on samba-technical if
required.  

The hope that this can be a truly community collaboration for those who
need to keep older Samba versions going for a bit longer (you do not
need to be on the Samba Team to help with backports of public patches).

You may have seen announcements from one party who is funding
some engineering of this effort, and we thank them for that, without
their support this would not be able to start.  

It is hoped, and really good success here will rely on this, that
others who are using Samba 4.7 and would like it supported a bit longer
to work with us on the backport efforts. 

For end users, we know that Samba moves fast, and so we hope this
allows you to obtain from your distributor longer support for Samba
than has been possible under the main release/use/deprecation cycle so
far.

Andrew Bartlett 

-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead                https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba
Catalyst.Net Ltd

Proudly developing Samba for Catalyst.Net Ltd - a Catalyst IT group
company

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